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From: Friedenthal,
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'syseng@omg.org'
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'
Subject:
Summary of INCOSE IW Review of
SysML on Jan 25-26 and
SE DSIG
Members,
The following
is a summary of the SysML review at the INCOSE International Workshop (IW) in
SysML Review
at INCOSE IW
The SysML Partners
was established in May 2003 to develop an extension to UML 2 called the Systems
Modeling Language (SysML). SysML is intended to address the requirements in the
UML for Systems Engineering RFP issued by the OMG on
The INCOSE IW
review was hosted by the INCOSE Model Driven System Design Working Group (MDSD)
and was chaired by Mike Dickerson and Dave Oliver. The SysML Presentation
slides from the review can be found on the SysML Partner website at www.sysml.org. The material presented
represents the preliminary approach for the UML extension based on the initial
draft V0.3 of the SysML specification, which is also available on the SysML
site.
SysML extends a
subset of UML V2.0 to provide the needed capabilities to specify, analyze,
design, and verify systems. The goal for this effort is to release V1.0 of the
SysML specification by the end of 2004 which addresses many of the critical
requirements in the RFP. Follow-on enhancements of SysML will address the
remaining requirements in the RFP. The primary V1.0 extensions include:
The review
feedback was quite positive relative to the direction and progress of SysML to
date. The outbrief af the INCOSE plenary by Dave and
Mike will also be available on the SysML site. In addition, the review team
provided some valuable feedback. Jim Long, who is one of the early pioneers in
behavior diagrams, helped to clarify some of the semantics of the enhanced
functional flow block diagram (EFFBD), which SysML is intended to support. In
addition, the INCOSE Requirements Working Group provided some excellent
feedback on the requirements diagram. There were approximately 75+ issues that
were identified. The outbrief provided a high
level summary of some of the more important issues and/or piriorities for the
team. In particular, there was a requrest to provide some level of support for
trade studies in the V1.0 capability, and also to provide clear distinctions
between the behavior and structure diagrams, as well as hybrid representations
of behavior and structure. Many thanks to Mike and Dave and the rest of the
review team for their contribution.
The SE DSIG
meetings in
SysML
Initial Submission Presentation to the ADTF
The SysML Partners
presented a breif overview of the initial draft SysML Specification V0.3 posted
to the OMG Website on
MDA and HLA
The meeting on MDA
and HLA was coordinated by Alan Moore and held on Tuesday, February 3 from
The meeting
included three excellent presentations on HLA basics; MDA concepts and its
relatioship to HLA ; and a briefing from the Websim
conference, where many MDA issues were also raised. These briefings are
intended to be available shortly on the SE DSIG site (refer to the Anaheim 2004
meeting link).
The questions
being addressed by this meeting involved the relationship between HLA and MDA,
and initial discussions on how the OMG might address HLA needs in the context
of MDA.. The ensuing discussion concluded that
Modelling and Simulation continues to be a very active area where an MDA
approach could have significant benefits. In particular, the HLA could potentially
be viewed as another target environment for MDA.
It was noted
that the Distributed Simulation SIG is about to disband. Mark Rheinlander
of Calytrix, a pioneer in the MDA for HLA area, volunteered to attempt to
rekindle interest in this area by providing clarification of the vision and
goals for such a group, and identifying key stakeholders who would be willing
participants in an OMG forum. Bjorn Moller from Pitch (another HLA vendor), and
Jim Tung from MathWorks also participated in the meeting, and showed interest
in exploring this further.
Joint SE
DSIG / /MANTIS Meeting
The Systems
Engineering DSIG met jointly with the Manufacturing and Industrial
Systems Task Force (MANTIS TF) Tuesday afternoon from 3:00-5:00.
Roger Burkhart from the SE DSIG and Uwe Kaufman from MANTIS coordinated the
meeting and can be contacted for futher information on this topic. Potential
overlapping interests between the SE DSIG and task force had been identified at
the previous OMG meeting in London, especially involving the relationship of
both groups to ISO STEP. This includes specific STEP modules such as
AP233 (Application Protocol for Systems Engineering) and PLM (Product Lifecycle
Management), and the need for both groups to deal with mapping of models between
UML and the EXPRESS-based infrastructure used by STEP.
Russell Claus
of NASA presented the MANTIS roadmap, which led to extensive discussion about
potential common interests besides ISO STEP. The Knowledge Based Engineering(KBE) RFP currently in preparation could apply to
systems engineering to support specification of design rules. It could
also have a relationship to the business rules effort within the Business
Enterprise Integration (BEI) task force. MANTIS reps were invited to
attend a joint meeting of the SE DSIG with the BEI TF on the following
afternoon.
The CAD
Services Version 2 RFP has a revised submission date of
The PLM
Services RFP issued by MANTIS now has a single submission that will go through
one more revision cycle. It provides a translation of
STEP Product Lifecycle Management information models into UML, so that
they can serve as an MDA Platform Independent Model to revise and extend the
previous PDM Enablers specification adopted by OMG, which was based on CORBA.
The proposed submission is one of the first uses of the STEP Part 25 draft
specification, which provides a mapping from EXPRESS into UML.
Roger Burkhart
presented slides provided by David Price of Eurostep, on "Tools for
UML/SysML and STEP Integration" (mantis/04-02-06). These presented
tools being developed to support both model and data transformation between
STEP and OMG-based infrastructures, which could apply to aligning the PLM and
AP233 work in STEP with the corresponding work in OMG.
The general
area of STEP to OMG alignment was considered to have such significant interest
to both groups that an ongoing liaison contact from the SE DSIG to MANTIS on
these topics was suggested. Jim U'Ren of NASA, chair of STEP AP233 and a
member of the SE DSIG, agreed to serve as a liaison between SE DSIG and
MANTIS. Both groups also plan to schedule
Joint SE
DSIG// BEITF Meeting
The Systems Engineering DSIG (SE DSIG) met jointly with the Business Enterprise
Integration DTF (BEI DTF) Wednesday afternoon from 2:00-4:45. Roger
Burkhart from the SE DSIG and Fred Cummins from BEITF coordinated the meeting
and can be contacted for futher information on this topic.
Potential overlapping interests between the SE DSIG and task force had started
being discussed at the previous OMG meeting in
After a round of introductions, each group reviewed the major items on their
respective roadmaps. BEI, which had just finalized a merger with the
previous Business Rules SIG, is progressing multiple
RFPs in area of business process definition, business rules, workflow
management, software portfolio, and organization structure. A business
modeling whitepaper is also being written. The SE DSIG developed the UML
for Systems Engineering RFP which is being progressed through the Analysis
& Design PTF (ADTF). A summary was provided of the areas covered by
this RFP, which had just received an initial submission from the SysML Partners
submission team.
Subsequent discussion reviewed the areas of potential common interest. Some
of these had first been raised at the OMG London meeting when SysML Partners
gave an initial overview of their submission. Areas of modeling that
could apply to both groups include structure and activity models, requirements
management, design rules, and simulation and execution. In general,
business process design can be viewed as one kind of systems engineering
design, since people and procedures are typically included in the scope of
systems engineering as well as software, hardware, and facilities.
Business design examples could be useful to validate responses to the UML for
An overview of the work on business rules, with particular focus on the
Business Semantics of Business Rules RFP for which initial submissions had just
been received, was presented by Stan Hendryx. With its focus on defining
vocabularies in which business rules are stated, this work has potential
applicability to the precise statement of requirements, that
are often text-based and can be viewed as specific kinds of business
rules. David Cuyler of Sandia offered to provide a point of contact from
the business rules work to the
Next
The next SE DSIG Meeting is planned for 1-2 days during
the week of April 26-30 in
OMG SE DSIG Chair
Lockheed Martin Corp
(703) 293-5557